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World War II Serb Holocaust No Fiction

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"Serbia's Suffering in Holocaust Is Exaggerated" (letter, April 29) by C. Michael McAdams is a slap in the face, not only to the memory of the Jews, Serbs and Gypsies who perished in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in World War II, but also to those who think one should look at history objectively and truthfully.

Contrary to Mr. McAdams, the process of exterminating Serbs in World War II Croatia is not "ancient fiction." It was judged at Nuremburg to have amounted to genocide. According to Prof. Fred Singleton in "A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples" (Cambridge, England, 1985), the behavior of the Croatian Ustasha shocked even Hitler's SS. Mr. Singleton quotes a February 1942 German security police report:

"The Ustasha units have carried out their atrocities not only against [ Eastern ] Orthodox males of military age, but in particular in the most bestial fashion, against unarmed old men, women and children . . . innumerable Orthodox have fled to rump Serbia, and their reports have roused the Serbian population to great indignation."

According to Professor Singleton, the leader of World War II Croatia, Ante Pavelic, was able to "wreak havoc on the Serbian population and to dishonor the name of Croatia by the appalling atrocities for which his regime became notorious."

In June 1941, Milan Budak, then Croatian minister of education, is on record as stating that Croatia was to be a state of two religions: Roman Catholicism and Islam. Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of wartime Croatia, and the Bosnian Muslims were encouraged to massacre Serbs; the Bosnian Muslim Handzjar unit of the SS was particularly effective in this regard. According to Budak's openly stated policy, Serbs should be dealt with in three ways: one-third to be exterminated, one-third deported and the rest converted to Catholicism.

It is still a matter of controversy how many Serbs were exterminated by the Croats: Serbian historians put the figure at 750,000, while German reports of the time estimate 350,000.

Mr. McAdams attempts to equate the systematic, open genocidal policies of the World War II Croatian Government with those of the Serbian quisling regime under Gen. Milan Nedic, who was despised by a vast majority of Serbs. He fled Yugoslavia after the war, but was turned over to Belgrade by the Americans for trial in 1946. NILS HORNER New York, May 2, 1994

A version of this letter appears in print on May 12, 1994, on Page A00024 of the National edition with the headline: World War II Serb Holocaust No Fiction. Today's Paper|Subscribe